


Floweytale

by 264feet



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Angst and Humor, Character Study, Depression, Gen, One Shot Collection, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pre-Canon, Suicide
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-03
Updated: 2018-06-28
Packaged: 2019-05-17 22:56:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14840774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/264feet/pseuds/264feet
Summary: For a seemingly endless amount of time before Frisk fell, the fate of the Underground rested on the metaphorical shoulders of a flower armed with nothing but a GameShark, violent and depressive tendencies, and plenty of time to kill. And lots of his former family and friends to kill, also. This occasionally would end in hilarity. More often, it wouldn't.[An anthology of Flowey-centric oneshots, set pre-canon UT.]





	1. flowey throws a temper tantrum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Characters: Flowey & Sans  
> Warnings: None  
> Summary: Flowey is a stone-cold, serious, calculating murderer and not at all just a child with issues. Sans is there.

_The skeleton raised his fist and rained justice down upon the sinner. What he lacked in strength, the murderous flower made up for in agility, weaving through each meteoric bone attack as if it were all a choreographed dance. Yet the skeleton wasn’t easily stopped, summoning a blaster that caught the flower off-guard, breaking their perfect rhythm. Hundreds of abruptly-silenced voices cried out as the coating of dust burned off the flower’s body._

_Flowey gave his opponent no quarter; his next timeline loaded with a machine-gun’s spray of bullets that drowned the light beaming through the arched windows. Sans watched them approach as if standing before a firing squad, before destiny itself, the scene only missing a cigarette dangling from his grim smile. Three bullets struck true and pierced through his chest and emerged out his back coated in red. Flowey cast his head back in uproarious laughter, shadows dancing on his face, eyes burning like lit coal. A much smaller laugh silenced his and he looked up incredulously only to be met with a ring of blasters and Sans, holding his jacket open, revealing only his ketchup bottle had been pierced rather than his thin spine and brittle ribs. Flowey’s mouth hung agape as the blasters fired, leaving nothing of him but a stain on the floor and an echo of laughter._

_Flowey loaded again and fired enough bullets to completely dwarf his last effort, but he had gotten angry, sloppy; Sans easily found a hole in his pattern and slipped through the cracks, taking a swig out of his pocket ketchup as if to gloat. No love was lost between them; the two couldn’t exist without one another in this moment, a grenade without a pin, a dry field without a match. Only the souls of the damned were left to witness this match that would tear apart time’s fabric itself: unstoppable force vs immovable object, light vs dark, good vs evil--_

“UGGGGHHHH!” Flowey groaned. “You stupid freaking CHEATER! You NEVER fight fair and it’s so STUPID!”

For a moment, Sans actually forgot to attack. “Huh,” he said, scratching his skull. “I have a feeling that’s the first thing you’ve said that wasn’t full of hot air.”

“SHUT UP! YOUR FACE IS FULL OF HOT AIR!” Flowey shouted. He took a deep breath, then let go, for a moment remembering his long-gone ‘Cool Evil Final Boss’ persona-- and then he let out a wail that contained all the rage of anyone who’s ever gotten, as gamers say, ‘owned’.  

Flowey thrashed about out of pure rage, the dramatic effect somewhat lessened by the soft, sandal-like ‘thwp’ sound his little flower body made as he slammed himself onto the ground, roaring in anger the whole time: “IDIOT! STUPID CHEATING JERK! JUST! LET! ME! WIN!”. He grabbed the yellow save point and chucked it like a video game controller. Sans caught flashes of The Void with every bounce, but otherwise just felt a disruption of some kind-- a disruption that broke the laws of reality caused by a child’s temper tantrum.

“I don’t think whatever you did was supposed to be possible,” he said, but Flowey was long past the realm of rationality. He was rolling back and forth, slamming into the walls, positively wailing, tears of frustration steaming from his eyes. Sans scratched the back of his head, uncomfortable at this shameful display. Only once did Flowey look up, completely quiet and sober, to see if he had managed to kill Sans in the crossfire.

“Are you done?” Sans asked.

Flowey threw his head back down and continued to scream. Bullets manifested and fired in the vague direction of Sans but mostly bounced off the walls like murderous ping-pong balls. As his turn approached, Sans felt like it would only be right to just put this thing out of its misery-- yet he was engrossed, like someone watching a train derailing in real time. It felt almost otherworldly to think that this brat had killed his brother.

Of course, knowing Papyrus, this flower thing probably whined and asked about reeeeaaaallllly wanting to kill him and Papyrus probably said, “Sure, since you want to so bad, why the heck not!”

Or maybe he was just having a fever dream. It was getting harder to tell.

“Look, ‘you win’,” Sans finally said. “How about that? Will you reset and play nice now?”

“I wanna kill you!” Flowey groaned. “I wanna kill you so bad you stupid cheating jerk idiot loser!”

This didn’t seem like the same flower that had a look on his face that definitely meant he’d given a past Sans (or two, or twenty) a long, overdramatic speech containing every single one of his faults. He wanted to ask how in the world he had managed to kill everyone else in the Underground, but he had-- oh God, he’d opened his blog and started crytyping. This was just embarrassing. There wasn’t even anyone to give him a sympathy Like.

“I’m calling you out,” Flowey said, voice hoarse from his tantrum. “First point: being stupid and sucking.”

“Cool. Can you @ me in it?”

“You’re supposed to be ashamed!”

“Awful bold of you to assume I can feel shame.”

The flower seemed to consider this. It was, in fact, quite true that Sans had showed up to this climactic battle with a gigantic ice cream stain on his shirt which, when asked about, he said he was “saving for later.” His other shirts had so many stains on them that Sans called them ‘the samplers’. He once hid a chicken nugget inside his skull as a dare and still couldn’t get it out.

“Point taken. Consider this,” Flowey said, a nanosecond before hurling the phone at him, which Sans dodged. “I hate you!” he shouted. “I’ll make you pay! I’m going to reset and kill Papyrus in front of you!”

“Ok.”

“And I’m going to torture everyone in Snowdin!” he added. “And I’m going to tear down Grillby’s!”

“Uh-huh.”

“And I… I…” Flowey stammered. He tsked. “Cheater!” he called out, one last time, before burrowing a hole and disappearing into it.

Sans stood for several moments, incredulous at what just happened. Of course the next Sans would have no idea, unless Flowey’s crocodile tears carried across timelines. How hilarious and oddly… ‘adorable’ wasn’t the right word, kind of like how you would hesitate to call a pony with nuclear launch codes adorable. But if that cute pony slammed its hoof onto that red button and destroyed the world, the last thing you would say would be, “what did you expect? It’s just a dumb fucking horse.”

Or something like that. Man, he was tired. And hungry. He thought about shaking his head as hard as possible to try and dislodge the nugget, but in the end, decided to make the effort to trudge over to Grillby’s.

“Aw man,” he mused aloud, having pulled out his phone. “He didn’t even @ me.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is something I've been wanting to write for a while. It will be updated sporadically, usually in-between other projects. I'll post a little synopsis of each little fic and any warnings for it at the beginning. I started with this one because it doesn't have any warnings I can think of and I couldn't resist writing out one of my shitposts.


	2. flowey watches naruto and has an existential crisis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Characters: Flowey & Alphys  
> Warnings: Mentions of death & suicide; depression; unreality/derealization; Alphys being a weeaboo   
> Summary: Flowey hangs out with Alphys and has a minor crisis realizing that he hasn't told her yet who he used to be.

“... which is why he seeks revenge on the universe,” Flowey said, gesturing to his drawing. “He won’t stop until he cuts everything in half with his blade- which gets stronger when it tastes blood--”

“Um, question,” Alphys said, holding up a hand. “Does it… er, get stronger when it tastes monster dust? The sword, I mean. Also, can it be like, anyone’s blood, or just blood of someone the sword killed?” she asked. “Could your OC just go find someone’s blood on the ground and tap the sword in it?”

Flowey stroked his chin with a vine. “First: yes, monster dust counts. Second, it has to be the blood or dust of someone the sword killed. It would be stupid otherwise.”

“What about his own dust? Can he just like… hurt himself, I guess, and put that on the sword?”

“I just said it had to be someone he killed, genius.”

Alphys adjusted her glasses, trying her hardest to get them to gleam in the light like in anime. “Ah, but didn’t you say he killed himself so he could ascend past his mortal form? Doesn’t he technically count?”

Flowey attempted to throw his drawing on the ground to great dramatic effect, but it fluttered down like a feather. “Who cares! He’s the strongest and nobody can beat him! That way he can get revenge!” he shouted, to Alphys’s great amusement.

She managed to stifle her giggles long enough to nod sagely. “Cool, cool. Seems like your OC kinda takes after Sasuke Uchicha.”

“Are you calling me a thief?!”

She laughed again, waving her hand. “No, no. I- I just think it’s cu-- er, funny, that you made such a dark and edgy OC. You look so…” She considered if ‘flowery’ was offensive to flower people- or flower person, since he was the only one. “... sunny?”

Of course, he had put on his best scowl before she got the word out. “Hmph. I have long since closed my eyes... My only goal is in the darkness,” he said, eliciting more giggles.

Flowey didn’t think of himself as someone who sought out making people laugh, but it was one challenge he hadn’t yet perfected. Finding the right variables that someone would find funny was, for now, proving interesting.

Besides that, he didn’t hate Alphys. For a while, he thought he did; it was technically her fault he was alive. But, in the end, he couldn’t hold onto strong feelings anymore than he could hold onto sand slipping through his (metaphorical) fingers. She was also a victim of circumstance. Alphys didn’t know that she would bring him back in this miserable form, and killing or torturing her didn’t bring him any reprieve-- it just felt pathetic, like putting down a wounded animal.

He had killed her in the last run, and this time, he felt like a break from the violence. She was one of the people he’d experimented less with on the friendship side of things. Plus, he’d already read all the books in the Snowdin Librarby, and he’d been meaning to get around to reading her manga.

“Your turn,” he said, still grumbly. “Tell me about your OC.”

“O-ok!” she said, slightly flustered. She held up a drawing that was somehow more glitter than paper. It had to many astonishingly bright colors that the government could make copies of it and put them alongside dark roads to help drivers. Of course, Flowey had worn down the black and dark-colored crayons making his OC, but even if he hadn’t, he thought her OC would still turn out this way. “Th-this is Hime Sakura-chan. She, um, is a transfer student in high school… but she accidentally transfers to a school full of neko girls, a-and… oh gosh…” She dabbed the sweat off her forehead, embarrassed.

“It’s good,” he lied, “keep going.”

“R-right!” she said. “So she thinks she’s so boring because she doesn’t have neko ears or a tail, b-but one of the older girls… who’s got big, awesome muscles…” she added with a cough, “offers her a ‘contract’ that would let her join her group of magical girls that fight monsters!”

“Monsters?” Flowey asked, raising a brow.

“Well, not like MONSTERS monsters,” she said, gesturing to herself. “I’m talking anime monsters.”

“I just think it’s weird how you always make a human,” he pointed out. His OC, of course, was a Boss Monster-werewolf-cyborg.

“I-it’s not weird! Humans are cool!” she said. There was a gleam in her eye. “Besides, she’s actually NOT a human, she’s a humanoid alien who was the last survivor of her planet and was sent down as a baby.”

“You’re the human version of a furry.”

“Hey!”

“I’m just saying,” Flowey said. “You always pick out anime where monsters are the bad guys. Don’t you ever hate humans for trapping us down here?”

She adjusted her glasses. “Well… I may be the Royal Scientist and supposed to be finding a way to get us out of here, but… I think humans are kinda cool!” she said. “I mean, I’ve heard the stories too. I know what humans did during the war, and how they killed Prince Asriel.”

If he had blood, it would have run cold.

“B-but, well, we all make mistakes,” she said, looking down at her feet. “I think us and humans could all cure our differences with… well… friendship. I know it’s cheesy and dumb, but it’s what I think.”

“If that’s what you want to think,” he said, solemnly. He didn’t give her time to reply before asking: “Hey. What do you know about this ‘Asriel’?”

“Uh… just that he was the King and Queen’s son, and after he died, the Queen left,” she said. “I haven’t asked Asgore about him or anything… it- it seems kinda rude.”

He mused on this for a moment. It wasn’t exactly that he was actively being forgotten. Asgore probably would’ve said something if she asked, but not without getting puffy-eyed. It was more that there was no reason to remember. This world had already moved on.

“Uh… if I may… why do you ask?” she said.

“Huh? No reason,” he said with a smile. “I’m just trying to learn everything I can about this world! I’m new here, after all! You just brought me into it!”

She chuckled, scratching the back of her head. She still thought he was just a being created with ‘Determination’. “Heh… y-yeah, you’re kinda like… a baby, I guess.”

“Not as big a baby as you. I didn’t cry during special episode 1483.5, director’s cut,” he said, as if he could feel anything.

“It was emotional!” she said, and he snickered. “O-oh, that reminds me! Part of that episode inspired Hime Sakura-chan!”

Alphys talked for a little bit more about how her OC was secretly a princess of a magic kingdom and how there might be a romance between her and the buff girl, but she could tell Flowey’s mind was elsewhere. “... Flowey?”

“Huh? I was listening!” he said, chipper. “Sugoi or something, right?”

She scratched her chin. “She- she doesn’t have to fight monsters. Or be a human, even...”

“It’s not about that.”

“A-are you sure?” she asked, but she wasn’t built to handle comforting a friend. She barely could handle the ‘friend’ part. “Well, okay…”

A timer went off nearby. “Oh! That must be the ramen!” she said, grateful for the excuse to get up. “I’ll be right back!”

He smiled at her as she went off to check on the food. How intriguing; he really didn’t know what he was feeling, if anything. Any new variable interested him, but he felt like he knew himself the least out of all the beings he studied. His mind had started to wander when she mentioned the difference between monsters and the type of monsters that she was.

It had been a pretty high number of resets since his awakening and already he’d started to distance himself from Asriel. He caught himself mentally referring to his parents by their first names rather than as ‘mom’ or ‘dad’. He felt alien in his old bedroom. There was only one tie he kept to his ‘old’ life, and even then, they were long dead.

He definitely wasn’t a ‘monster’ monster like Alphys, not anymore. He had a physical body- in the form of a dinky flower- and no soul. He was Something Else, something that nobody could have predicted. Sometimes, it excited him, thinking of himself as a one-of-a-kind being that would tear apart the world. Sometimes, he realized how far away he really was from anyone he tried to play ‘friend’ with, looking at this stupid drawing he made, remembering spending morning upon morning wearing crayons down to nubs making fun drawings with Chara--

Alphys returned with two cup ramens. Good. He didn’t want to go down that line of thought again. He slowed his breathing and put on a sunny smile.

“Here you go!” she said, placing a cup ramen in front of him. “One for you with a fork, my gaijin friend. And one for me with chopsticks.”

“Yeah, yeah, weeb,” he said. Out of all the things he could do to dull the burning boredom in his mind, learning how to use chopsticks wasn’t particularly high on his list.

He used a vine to scoop some noodles in his mouth, savoring the salty taste. He didn’t need to eat- being a flower, or Something Else- but it was something to do, and he liked trying different things. Maybe in a future timeline, he would become a gourmet or something.

What else was there to do?

Alphys giggled at being called a weeb. “Itadakimasu!” she said, flashing a peace sign, promptly dropping her chopsticks on the ground. She scrambled to pick them up, embarrassed.

For a while, the only sounds were their slurping up noodles. Flowey reached for the tablet and put on another anime episode to watch while they ate; he didn’t feel too talkative anymore.

As she watched the opening, he watched Alphys. She was already engrossed, murmuring some of the opening’s lyrics under her breath despite having a mouthful of ramen. He had told her in this timeline that the Determination brought him to life, and it barely took any coaxing to get her to let him stick around.

Not once had he told Alphys what he really was. He had killed her already, hoping it would bring him some degree of peace-- it didn’t. He had caused her to kill herself, telling her that she was worthless and a failure and deserved to die-- she was dust within hours without so much as mentioning his former name. And he had played nice, too, but he had always done so this same way: just popping up and saying he was Flowey.

It was bad enough seeing the look of pity on Asgore or Toriel’s face. The thought of Alphys actually apologizing to him for his own existence didn’t sit right with him.

Alphys continued to slurp up her noodles. She was oblivious and, ostensibly, happy. He thought about saying it right then: “I’m Asriel Dreemurr.” He had started to learn all of her patterns but couldn’t predict what she would do. The burning curiosity inside him demanded that he do it-- he opened his mouth to say it-- and then he stopped.

No. He hated himself. He wasn’t Asriel. Asriel was dead. He was Flowey now.

Was that completely true?

It’s not like he could feel sentimental or sad, and even if she did pity him or apologize, he could silence her for as long as he wanted-- until the next reload. And the memory of that miserable look she would give him would live forever.

She didn’t know the first thing about Asriel. She had no reason to care.

… Yet even if she had no reason to care, she still would. That’s how people with souls were. She could have thrown away the key to the True Lab ages ago, but instead, she had made copies in case she lost it. She prepared fresh meals- not just microwave ones- to take downstairs and even got a bag of dog food for Endogeny. She was depressed, but she hadn’t given up on the world.

Depressed, he thought, as she burst out laughing at one of the anime’s jokes. There was an interesting word. Ever since he had moved in with her, she’d been putting on a brave face for him, even eating three square meals a day-- well, as much as ramen could be considered a ‘square meal’. Judging by the state of her own unwashed dishes, it seemed like she didn’t eat more than once per day, if that. Every time Mettaton or Asgore called, she stared at her phone until it went quiet, a faraway look in her eyes. Flowey couldn’t necessarily smell, but he could tell she was getting grungy, not having changed her clothes in days.

Yet she didn’t cry.

Chara had cried. Chara didn’t let anyone see, but Asriel saw the rhythmic rise and fall of their curled-up figure under the blanket when they thought he was asleep. Chara had been depressed. They never said why. At least, they weren’t happy, their smiles all performative. They had killed themself for the plan, but Flowey never thought until now that maybe they really did want to die.

He, as Flowey, didn’t cry either. He could shed tears experimentally, but mostly he just felt… numb. Just nothing, like he wouldn’t care if he fell off the face of the world if it weren’t for all the Determination in him. He found himself spending a long time in the dark room in Waterfall, not lighting up the path, trying to lose his sense of self in the void. He could stay there for days at a time; as a flower, he didn’t need to eat or sleep or take care of himself like Alphys or Chara did, so it didn’t count if he didn’t take care of himself.

Suddenly, he thought: am I depressed?

The episode kept playing on the screen. Flowey realized she had looked at him to make sure he was interested, and he made sure to laugh the next time she did. It was during a suicide joke.

Man, he didn’t get humor.

Flowey watched the way the colors and shapes on the screen fluctuated. Nothing really dictated that the characters on the screen were ‘characters’ besides the audience’s willingness to believe it were true. Nothing really dictated the same about real life. After a while, even Alphys sitting next to him seemed like nothing more than a collection of colors and shapes.

Everyone he knew was just dust pretending to have a shape, dust pretending to care, to love. But dust had its limits. Once he learned everything he could from the scientist, he would turn her back into dust. It was inevitable around him. He wanted to take all the blame- or credit, depending on how he looked at it- but it was surely her own fault. Her own fault for caring. Her own fault for being friends with someone who literally couldn’t be friends back. Her own fault for being emotional dust.

The episode soon drew to a close, and then the screen turned black, and then he saw nothing on it but darkness reflecting his own unfamiliar face.

“That was a great episode, huh, Flowey?” she said. The colors and shapes melded together: empty ramen cup, askew chopsticks, smiling Alphys. Made up of awkward angles and oversized smiles and a little something extra besides dust that he didn’t have.

He blinked, focusing his vision again. “Yeah!” he said. “It was great!”

She beamed, picking up her and Flowey’s empty cups. She put them meaningfully near the other dirty dishes, as if trying to signal that her life was under control and she would definitely wash them soon. “Um, Flowey, could I talk to you about something?”

He looked up curiously. “Go for it.”

“Well… I- I guess I wanted to say… thanks,” she said, bashfully. “I’ve never had anyone who would, like… watch this stuff with me, or even make OCs with me. I always felt like such a dweeb for it. I- I mean, one person was also into it, but… we don’t talk much anymore,” she trailed off. “But you’re here! And you’re really nice, and… well, thanks.”

If he focused hard enough, he could almost imagine these words meaning something to him. “I guess you could say you literally made a friend.”

Alphys stifled a giggle. “It… it wasn’t my goal, but I’m… I’m glad it worked out this way. If there’s ever anything I can do for you, just… let me know, ok? I’m, er… here… for you.”

It was almost, dare he say, comforting-- endearing, even. As if there were anything in the world she could do to actually help him. If he was an endless expanse of overgrown wasteland, she was a child with a plastic lawn mower.

“Golly! Well, same here!” he said. “Whatever you need!”

She stood there for a moment, awkwardly. “W-well,” she said, finally, “I’m gonna head to bed for the night.”

“Huh? Already?”

“Yep. Making OCs sure takes up a lot of energy,” she said. Even her lies were oddly cute atop their patheticness, like a crying kitten. “I’ll, uh, be upstairs if you need me! Goodnight!”

“Goodnight,” he said.

Flowey stared at the drawing of his OC as Alphys went up the stairs. His eyes met the OC’s own blood-red ones. It seemed to be trying to say something to him, something deep, something meaningful, something that could end all this.

In the end, all it really said to him as “psh… nothin’ personal, kid.” So there was that.

A soft thump told him that Alphys threw herself in bed. It was silent for several minutes. Alphys always snored while she slept, but before she got there, it was hours of anxious tossing and turning. Judging by the silence and stillness, she was laying on top of the covers, staring at the ceiling.

They were all just dust. Just games. Just drawings to be discarded when they were no longer interesting. The knowledge overwhelmed him like light ‘overwhelmed’ a black hole. He wasn’t sure if it meant anything that he was beyond panic attacks now. Maybe he had moved on. Maybe he was just so far gone that he didn’t know which way was back. He didn’t know.

What he did know was that the stench of this place was giving him a headache.

If she heard him picking up the dishes, she didn’t say anything. She stayed quiet, too, as the knob creaked and water started to trickle out of the tap, and as he picked up a dish with a vine and started to scrub.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is supposed to be set after Flowey starts killing people, but not too far into his resets. I should mention that these oneshots won't be in consecutive chronological order.


	3. flowey has a day off from jerk school

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Characters: Flowey & Papyrus & Sans  
> Warnings: None  
> Summary: After having lived with the skelebros for a little while, they have their first day being snowed in.

Not many residents of the Underground remembered that the sleepy winter town originally was just called “Snowed In”- thanks to the King’s great naming sense- but became ‘Snowdin’ in common vernacular. Then, every so often, the town had to remind them.

Flowey still sat in his ceramic pot by the window even though all he could see outside was white. Not the type of white where he could make out kids playing and see individual snowflakes falling; it was the type of white where the howling wind was the only way of knowing there was still an outside.

While Sans had been content to have an excuse not to go to work, Papyrus had been pacing around the living room, as if trying to patrol for ants.

“I’m missing so much! My patrols! My training with Undyne! People could need my help out there!” he said. “And what if my skills get rusty?!”

“I don’t think one day off will hurt you,” Flowey said.

“One day off could make all the difference! I need to keep my skill tree watered and make sure the ball is stayed on top of!” he paused, as if trying to think about what that really meant. “I need to do something!”

“How about you whip up some hot chocolate?” Sans asked. Flowey still couldn’t tell if he intentionally was asleep on the floor or if he fell off the couch and stayed there; both felt likely. “After all, this is our flower pal’s first time being snowed in, isn’t it?”

“You’re just using me as a ploy to get a glass of sugar,” Flowey said.

Sans shrugged. “And?”

Papyrus, though, had taken to the idea. “It is his first ‘snow day’! Besides the fact that every other day here is a snow day,” he said. “That’s it! If I can’t go out and help the common people, I’ll help the common flower!”

“Plus, if you make it, it won’t be a half-melted chocolate bar in a mug this time,” Flowey said, giving Sans a look.

“That counted,” Sans said, from the floor. “It was chocolate and it was hot.”

As Papyrus went off to make the drinks, Flowey kept staring out the window. It was easy to take things slow in these timelines messing with Sans and Papyrus. They both had such big personalities that he could just sit back and watch them suffer through stupid but comedic interactions with one another for days at a time. It was a nice way to take a break from some of his worse experiments.

As he stared at himself in the glass, he realized it had been about a month in this timeline since Papyrus asked Flowey to move in with them-- as much as you could ‘move in’ a flower, anyway.

“Whatcha thinking about? Regret moving in here yet?” Sans said. “These aren’t the best conditions for a flower.”

“Not the best for a lazybones, either,” Flowey said. “Everyone’s gonna try and get togther to clear the streets soon.”

“Which is why I’m unleashing my brilliant invention. Dr. Alphys, eat your heart out,” Sans said. As if on cue, the small white dog ran up, scraping the carpet with a miniature snowplow attached to a collar. “Voila.”

“That’s absolutely useless,” Flowey said. “It’s just going to push infinitesimal amounts of snow uselessly.”

The dog yapped proudly. Also as if on cue, Papyrus returned holding a tray of mugs and shooed the dog off to another part of the house. “Ugh! Snowed in with a lazy, stinky little scoundrel!”

“Not to mention me and a dog,” Flowey said. Sans snorted.

Although Flowey didn’t really need to eat or drink, Papyrus still had made him his own cup of hot chocolate. He placed it near his flower pot-- Flowey gave a soft sigh of relief that he didn’t just dump it on him the way you’d water a potted plant. A cloud of steam billowed up from the mug, warming his face and petals. The aroma seemed to warm him inside, too; this was authentic hot chocolate, made with milk rather than water, with chocolate melted inside rather than being some stirred-in powder.

“Thanks, bro,” Sans said. “Why did you not make yourself one with chocolate in it though?”

“It’s a little too sweet for me!” Papyrus said. “I made mine without!”

“So we got hot chocolate and you just got a cup of… hot,” Sans said.

“Yes!” He took a sip. “That reminds me, I was afraid Flowey would be cold! So I took the liberty of making him a scarf this morning! How could I forget?” he said. Papyrus flew- almost literally- up the stairs to his room and back. In his free hand was a baby-size red scarf. “Here it is! It’s so we can match!”

Flowey let Papyrus wrap it around his stem. “Ta-da!” Papyrus said. “I must say, you look almost as stunning as a certain handsome guardsman-to-be!”

“I thought we could put a little snow plow on him too, but this is fine,” Sans said.

“Thank you, Papyrus,” he said, adjusting himself to it. “It’s great.”

“I know,” Papyrus said. “You’re welcome!”

It was warm, not at all itchy like he expected. Something about it felt… nice. Flowey couldn’t quite place it-- just that he would miss the scarf when he inevitably reset. While he wouldn’t ever feel whole, the scarf and hot cocoa along with the friendly banter warmed him inside for at least a little bit. And that was enough for now.


End file.
